What’s your company’s Facebook LPM (Likes per Million)?

Every company can compare its brand value to that of its competitors based on a readily available scale: Facebook “likes,” adjusted for company revenue.

Measuring brand value has always been something of a dark art. Marketers have experimented with many combinations of financial metrics, consumer research, and gut feel, seeking a scale. But the data is typically inconclusive, difficult and expensive to gather, and almost impossible to use in comparing one company to another. Fortunately, there is now a very easy way to track the number of consumers who value your brand, by using one of Facebook’s simplest features: “likes.”

What is brand value? To marketers, it is the proportion of consumers who are actively engaged with a group of products or services. Marketers continually seek to track the number of engaged consumers (sometimes known as brand zealots), because they are willing either to pay more for the brand (earning the company a price premium) or to go out of their way to get it (leading to more volume). The more zealots you have, the stronger your brand loyalty and the more valuable your brand.

A company’s (or brand’s) Facebook page is an Internet destination tailored for those zealots. It’s where people come to get information about the brand and to engage in dialogue with the producers and others who care. Social network statistics, particularly the number of Facebook “likes,” are thus indicators of brand engagement.

However, when considered on their own, these statistics are unreliable. Since larger firms with more customers almost inevitably attract more followers, the raw number of “likes” that a page has earned may simply reflect the size of the company behind it. Recently, we hypothesized that a true indication of brand value would be the popularity of the brand’s Facebook page indexed to the size of its revenue stream. If you could track your Facebook LPM — your likes per million dollars of revenue — you’d have a pretty good proxy for the way people feel about your products and services. Read more: